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Countless startups around the world are being launched every week.
Many fail because they did not learn from the success of other companies who've managed to rise above.
We just published this list of 42 startups that failed due to no market need, along with analyses on why they shut down and interviews with their founders.
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Information about the industries, countries, and cities they generally invest in.
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Information about their valuation, HQ's location, founded year, name of founders, funding amount and number of employees.
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List of startup investors in the FinTech industry, along with their Twitter, LinkedIn, and email addresses.
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Aria Insights developed highly advanced drones. After some pivots, the company couldn't find out the correct business model and had to shut down.
Details of the startup:
Founders:
Helen Greiner
Country:
United States
Industry:
Software & Hardware
Started in:
2008
Closed in:
2019
Nº of employees:
10-50
Funding Amount:
$10M-$50M
Specific cause of failure:
Multiple Reasons
You can read more about their failure here.
Berg was a cloud platform on which Little Printer, an IoT device, worked. They had loyal supporters, but couldn't convert it into a sustainable business.
Details of the startup:
Founders:
Matt Webb
Country:
United Kingdom
Industry:
Design
Started in:
2005
Closed in:
2014
Nº of employees:
10-50
Funding Amount:
$1M-$10M
Specific cause of failure:
No Market Need
You can read more about their failure here.
Dinnr allowed to select a recipe and order pre-measured ingredients accompanied with instructions. However, there wasn’t a market need for the business.
Details of the startup:
Founders:
Adil Mohammed, Michal Bohanes
Country:
United Kingdom
Industry:
Food & Beverage
Started in:
2012
Closed in:
2014
Nº of employees:
1-10
Funding Amount:
< $1M
Specific cause of failure:
No Market Need
You can read more about their failure here.
EventVue helped to improve the conference networking experience. They lacked product-market fit and failed to test early the usefulness of the product.
Details of the startup:
Founders:
Josh Fraser, Rob Johnson
Country:
United States
Industry:
Finances
Started in:
2007
Closed in:
2010
Nº of employees:
1-10
Funding Amount:
< $1M
Specific cause of failure:
Lack of PMF
You can read more about their failure here.
Moped was a free social app. It had not enough entertaining and fast-growing content that could attract a broad mass of users. It closed after 16 years.
Details of the startup:
Founders:
Schuyler Deerman
Country:
Germany
Industry:
Social Media
Started in:
1998
Closed in:
2014
Nº of employees:
10-50
Funding Amount:
$1M-$10M
Specific cause of failure:
No Market Need
You can read more about their failure here.
PoliMobile provided political campaigns with a strategic way to reach their supporters. No one wanted to pay for such a service and they had to shut down.
Details of the startup:
Founders:
Curt Prins
Country:
United States
Industry:
Marketing
Started in:
2011
Closed in:
2015
Nº of employees:
1-10
Funding Amount:
$0
Specific cause of failure:
No Market Need
You can read more about their failure here.
An analysis on why did Quibi, a short-form video streaming platform, shut down despite raising $1.8 billion from investors and having an experienced team.
Details of the startup:
Founders:
Jeffrey Katzenberg
Country:
United States
Industry:
Entertainment
Started in:
2018
Closed in:
2020
Nº of employees:
250-500
Funding Amount:
> $50M
Specific cause of failure:
Multiple Reasons
You can read more about their failure here.
ShipItWise was a way of booking shipping services. However, the transportation companies involved weren’t eager on jumping on this new technology.
Details of the startup:
Founders:
Aleksander Gansen, Anna Medjanskaja, Olari Miiter, Ragmar Saksing & Sander Gansen
Country:
Estonia
Industry:
Transportation
Started in:
2016
Closed in:
2019
Nº of employees:
1-10
Funding Amount:
< $1M
Specific cause of failure:
No Market Need
You can read more about their failure here.
Sip was made by ProductHunt. It covered news in the tech industry in a bite-size format. Due to no market need and lack of focus, PH shut it down.
Details of the startup:
Founders:
Ryan Hoover, Nick Abouzeid, Chad Whitaker
Country:
United States
Industry:
Productivity
Started in:
2018
Closed in:
2019
Nº of employees:
1-10
Funding Amount:
$0
Specific cause of failure:
Multiple Reasons
You can read more about their failure here.
TeeBeeDee was a social network aimed at people over 40 to share their experiences. They weren’t able to grow their user base fast enough to survive.
Details of the startup:
Founders:
David Markus, Jon Brandt, Robin Wolaner, Todd Basche
Country:
United States
Industry:
Social Media
Started in:
2007
Closed in:
2009
Nº of employees:
10-50
Funding Amount:
$1M-$10M
Specific cause of failure:
Bad Business Model
You can read more about their failure here.
Teforia was a tea brewer that yielded the perfect cup of tea by combining tradition with smart technology. It had an absence of market fit and shut down.
Details of the startup:
Founders:
Allen Han, Kris Efland
Country:
United States
Industry:
Food & Beverage
Started in:
2014
Closed in:
2017
Nº of employees:
10-50
Funding Amount:
$10M-$50M
Specific cause of failure:
No Market Need
You can read more about their failure here.
Vreal was a virtual reality startup that enabled users to interact with content creators. They were ahead of their time in a market not fully developed.
Details of the startup:
Founders:
Todd Hooper
Country:
United States
Industry:
Entertainment
Started in:
2015
Closed in:
Active
Nº of employees:
10-50
Funding Amount:
$10M-$50M
Specific cause of failure:
Bad Timing
You can read more about their failure here.
Wattage was a platform with an ambitious goal: to break the entry barrier for hardware design. They weren't able to validate market interest.
Details of the startup:
Founders:
Brett Hagman, Jeremy Bell, Peter Nitsch
Country:
Canada
Industry:
Software & Hardware
Started in:
2014
Closed in:
2015
Nº of employees:
50-100
Funding Amount:
< $1M
Specific cause of failure:
No Market Need
You can read more about their failure here.
101 Studios was a producer of video games that taught users things while they played. They went with a “business to professor” business model, but despite professors like the idea, they wouldn’t implement it in their classes. The startup could never reach product-market fit and shut down months later.
Details of the startup:
Founder:
Matt “GundayMonday” Sever
Country:
United States
Industry:
Education
Started in:
Closed in:
Funding Amount:
$0
Specific cause of failure:
Bad Market Fit
You can read more about their failure here.
After dropping out of university, Harry went back home and found a gift: a fake big tweet from Federer. That’s when he came with a business idea: fake tweets printed and sold for £30. He partnered with a friend and launched the project within 2 months. However, after a Youtube’s influencer campaign, the site got 17,000 visitors and only 20 sales. That’s when they realized not so many people were interested in their product...
Details of the startup:
Founder:
Harry Dry
Country:
United Kingdom
Industry:
e-Commerce
Started in:
2017
Closed in:
2018
Funding Amount:
$0
Specific cause of failure:
No Market Need
You can read more about their failure here.
ABBY was a documentation service for A/B tests. To make such a service successful, Andy would have needed to educate the users, and that was not possible.
Details of the startup:
Founder:
Andy Goldschmidt
Country:
Germany
Industry:
Analytics
Started in:
2015
Closed in:
2016
Funding Amount:
$0
Specific cause of failure:
No Market Need
You can read more about their failure here.
Addressbin was an easy way to collect email addresses. Bad marketing and big competitors where the problems that dug its grave.
Details of the startup:
Founder:
Adam Bard
Country:
Canada
Industry:
Software & Hardware
Started in:
2013
Closed in:
2018
Funding Amount:
$0
Specific cause of failure:
Bad Marketing
You can read more about their failure here.
AskTina was a live video chat widget for experts to install on their blogs. They did not spend enough time validating the idea through customer interviews before investing in building the MVP.
Details of the startup:
Founder:
Tom Hunt
Country:
United Kingdom
Industry:
Software & Hardware
Started in:
2016
Closed in:
2017
Funding Amount:
$0
Specific cause of failure:
Bad Market Fit
You can read more about their failure here.
BeehiveID was a startup on the dating market, that identified online accounts created for fraudulent use. Techstars and RightSide Capital decided to invest $70K on their business. However, after some months BeehiveID closed their doors. Being too dependent on Facebook data killed their startup.
Details of the startup:
Founder:
Mary Haskett
Country:
United States
Industry:
Software & Hardware
Started in:
2013
Closed in:
2015
Funding Amount:
< $100K
Specific cause of failure:
Dependence on Others
You can read more about their failure here.
Botnim was a web application that provided near dishes and their nutritional values. Read now the story of the 2 co-founders with a failed startup.
Details of the startup:
Founder:
Shaked Klein Orbach & Gilad Peled
Country:
Israel
Industry:
Food & Beverage
Started in:
2017
Closed in:
2017
Funding Amount:
$0
Specific cause of failure:
Bad Market Fit
You can read more about their failure here.
Andrew Kamphey has started several projects related to creators and influencer marketing. One of them was Creator Growth Lab, a tool to help Instagram creators grow by themselves. He invested $5,000, never made a penny, and realized there was no need for that product.
Details of the startup:
Founder:
Andrew Kamphey
Country:
Indonesia
Industry:
Analytics
Started in:
2018
Closed in:
2019
Funding Amount:
$0
Specific cause of failure:
Dependence on Others
You can read more about their failure here.
Delite was a SaaS platform for B2B wholesale orders. It didn’t satisfy any necessity of customers. Just that thing in life you keep putting off.
Details of the startup:
Founder:
Patrick Walls
Country:
United States
Industry:
Software & Hardware
Started in:
2016
Closed in:
2017
Funding Amount:
$0
Specific cause of failure:
No Market Need
You can read more about their failure here.
Eloquis was all about bringing personalization to mobile apps. The problem? Early in the market and targeted the wrong customer segment.
Details of the startup:
Founder:
Rohit Nallapeta
Country:
United States
Industry:
Software & Hardware
Started in:
2010
Closed in:
2011
Funding Amount:
$0
Specific cause of failure:
No Market Need
You can read more about their failure here.
Justin Anyanwu is a maker who a few years ago built Eventloot, a SaaS platform for wedding planning professionals. He hired some designers and developers and got the SaaS working. But after a few months of running Facebook Ads and sending cold emails, they decided to shut it down. They hadn’t built a platform that solved the problems wedding planners had.
Details of the startup:
Founder:
Justin Anyanwu
Country:
United States
Industry:
Software & Hardware
Started in:
2014
Closed in:
2017
Funding Amount:
$0
Specific cause of failure:
No Market Need
You can read more about their failure here.
Andrey Norin is a budding entrepreneur, responsible for all the successes and the failures of ExploreVR. This was a directory site focused 100% on virtual reality. He started it in 2017 and shut down a few months later. His lack of experience in creating a business from scratch was the main cause of failure.
Details of the startup:
Founder:
Andrey Norin
Country:
United States
Industry:
Software & Hardware
Started in:
2017
Closed in:
2017
Funding Amount:
$0
Specific cause of failure:
Lack of Experience
You can read more about their failure here.
Fantastic House Buyers was an online service designed to improve the expensive and stressful experience of buying a house in the UK. Alan built it himself and start trying a lot of different marketing strategies. However, after a few months, he realized he had built something that no-one wanted.
Details of the startup:
Founder:
Alan Murray
Country:
United Kingdom
Industry:
Services
Started in:
2017
Closed in:
2018
Funding Amount:
$0
Specific cause of failure:
No Market Need
You can read more about their failure here.
Gymlisted was a website for finding the right private gym. Every day, Tom would go home from his day job and code up features for Gymlisted until midnight. Once launched, they started with their marketing efforts. But they soon realized there was pretty much no demand for what they were offering.
Details of the startup:
Founder:
Tom Zaragoza
Country:
Canada
Industry:
Software & Hardware
Started in:
2017
Closed in:
2018
Funding Amount:
$0
Specific cause of failure:
No Market Need
You can read more about their failure here.
Pierre co-founded Hello Tyro, a platform matching students with internship opportunities in Belgian startups. They raised €250k and reached €4k MRR at their top but didn't find Product-Market Fit. They ran out of cash and filed for bankruptcy in 2020.
Details of the startup:
Founder:
Pierre Tillement
Country:
Belgium
Industry:
Software & Hardware
Started in:
2017
Closed in:
2020
Funding Amount:
$100K-$500K
Specific cause of failure:
No Market Need
You can read more about their failure here.
Wit Sumathavanit has recently started to pivot from offline to online entrepreneurship. But before that, he tried to build a juice business in Bangkok. He lost around $3,000 but those learnings impacted his process to validate new ideas.
Details of the startup:
Founder:
Wit Sumathavanit
Country:
Thailand
Industry:
Food & Beverage
Started in:
2020
Closed in:
2020
Funding Amount:
$0
Specific cause of failure:
No Market Need
You can read more about their failure here.
In 2012, Ivo started a 3-year journey building a business that sold iPad racing wheels, which would suck up $50,000 in personal and investor funds. The hardware accelerator he went through wasn't able to help turn his business into a success, neither was the Kickstarter campaign successful. Learning from the experience, today Ivo runs $1M+ crowdfunding campaigns. Read below to learn about his journey.
Details of the startup:
Founder:
Ivaylo Kalburdzhiev
Country:
Bulgaria
Industry:
Software & Hardware
Started in:
2012
Closed in:
2015
Funding Amount:
< $100K
Specific cause of failure:
No Market Need
You can read more about their failure here.
Stepa co-founded MyCity, a tool for local authorities to build relationships with their residents. After realizing they had created a product for a non-existing market, they decided to shut it down.
Details of the startup:
Founder:
Stepa Mitaki
Country:
Russia
Industry:
Software & Hardware
Started in:
2014
Closed in:
2016
Funding Amount:
< $100K
Specific cause of failure:
No Market Need
You can read more about their failure here.
Following his objective of reaching $10k/month from his online businesses, Jake launched NE Lounge, an Amazon FBA store selling inflatable products. 1 year and $16,000 later, the startup shut down. Choosing the wrong product in an unfamiliar niche is the cause to blame.
Details of the startup:
Founder:
Jake Lang
Country:
United States
Industry:
e-Commerce
Started in:
2017
Closed in:
2018
Funding Amount:
$0
Specific cause of failure:
No Market Need
You can read more about their failure here.
Wes founded Pactero, a platform to simplify the process of managing income share agreements. He confused the initial launch hype with market validation, but it was vanity. The business made around $180 total after spending $55k.
Details of the startup:
Founder:
Wes Wagner
Country:
United States
Industry:
Education
Started in:
2020
Closed in:
2021
Funding Amount:
$100K-$500K
Specific cause of failure:
No Market Need
You can read more about their failure here.
Phoenix was a SaaS app to send a last message to the people you love when you die. However, it was the app which died first.
Details of the startup:
Founder:
Enrique Benitez
Country:
Mexico
Industry:
Software & Hardware
Started in:
2017
Closed in:
2017
Funding Amount:
$0
Specific cause of failure:
No Market Need
You can read more about their failure here.
Gregg Blanchard developed Readership from a fascination with Twitter API. While the visual analytics on Readership was appealing, it didn’t bring enough marketing value to get the buy-in needed to be a successful start-up.
Details of the startup:
Founder:
Gregg Blanchard
Country:
United States
Industry:
Analytics
Started in:
2019
Closed in:
2019
Funding Amount:
$0
Specific cause of failure:
No Market Need
You can read more about their failure here.
Toby founded two projects that gave him lots of valuable lessons for his current Startup Mill projects. They were RealityHunt and "I Voted Remain". He learned to build a simple landing page before committing to building it and to build processes that simplify your way of working.
Details of the startup:
Founder:
Toby Allen
Country:
Belgium
Industry:
Software & Hardware
Started in:
2016
Closed in:
2017
Funding Amount:
$0
Specific cause of failure:
No Market Need
You can read more about their failure here.
Matt created Tali, a timekeeping solution for lawyers powered by voice technology like Amazon Alexa, and Google Assistant. Like many first start-ups, they encountered many mistakes while trying to build. He created Tali in the effort to help lawyers more effectively keep track of their time instead of using pen and paper. Ultimately, due to a lack of traction and a misfit product market they had to wind things down.
Details of the startup:
Founder:
Matthew Volm
Country:
United States
Industry:
Software & Hardware
Started in:
2017
Closed in:
2019
Funding Amount:
$500K-$1M
Specific cause of failure:
Bad Market Fit
You can read more about their failure here.
Tandem was a live streaming platform for fitness. Cause of failure? Live fitness isn't that engaging. Influencers were reluctant to adopt a new platform.
Details of the startup:
Founder:
Nick Raushenbush
Country:
United States
Industry:
Health
Started in:
2016
Closed in:
2016
Funding Amount:
$0
Specific cause of failure:
Bad Market Fit
You can read more about their failure here.
Will is a software engineer based in San Francisco, who co-founded Tandem, an app to help people stay on top of their medications. They carried out some research and considered it was a great business idea. But, after launching, they discovered retention was really difficult and decided not to continue.
Details of the startup:
Founder:
Will Sun
Country:
United States
Industry:
Health
Started in:
2016
Closed in:
2016
Funding Amount:
$0
Specific cause of failure:
No Market Need
You can read more about their failure here.
Team Voice was a SaaS platform for HR professionals. The problem they were trying to solve turned out to be a human problem, not a technology one.
Details of the startup:
Founder:
Kirill Vechtomov
Country:
Canada
Industry:
Software & Hardware
Started in:
2015
Closed in:
2017
Funding Amount:
$0
Specific cause of failure:
No Market Need
You can read more about their failure here.
When reading the Lean Startup book, Sergio came up with an idea he wanted to validate: a SaaS to help teams to perform at a higher level. The validation was done successfully, but since then, mistakes related to technology, founding team and listening to customers, meant its shut down 2 years later.
Details of the startup:
Founder:
Sergio Schüler
Country:
Brazil
Industry:
Software & Hardware
Started in:
2012
Closed in:
2013
Funding Amount:
$0
Specific cause of failure:
No Market Need
You can read more about their failure here.
WorldOS was a P2P infrastructure provider. Lucas tried to productize a buzzword, but was not solving the right problem.
Details of the startup:
Founder:
Lucas Gonze
Country:
United States
Industry:
Software & Hardware
Started in:
2005
Closed in:
2005
Funding Amount:
$0
Specific cause of failure:
No Market Need
You can read more about their failure here.
